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There was a recent Facebook debate and furor over the ethics of cop killing. It was sparked, at least in part, by my stating that killing cops was still murder in a status update. The topic deserves further exploration. Killing cops is acceptable in self-defense. If a police officer commits an act of aggressive violence against you, you’re entitled to strike back with a reasonable proportionate amount of force. You’re also in the right when you intervene to stop police from say raping or murdering someone right in front of you. If my memory serves me correctly, no one in...

The core values animating left-libertarian market anarchism are individual freedom and equality of rights. This is preferably applied to children as well as adults. One person who saw this clearly was the radical educator, John Holt. As far as I know; he never identified as a libertarian or an anarchist, but his thought is eminently libertarian or anarchist. He wrote about many freedoms for children, but this post will focus on his view of educational freedom and related issues. John Holt’s classic book on the subject of child freedom is called Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children....

The New York Times recently reminded me of the infamous Baghdad shootings by Blackwater mercenaries. These shootings were symbolic of the broader violent aggression which Iraqis had been subjected to. Blackwater has rebranded itself as Academi, but its legacy as participant in imperial aggression lives on. It’s a perfect illustration of the faux corporate capitalist “privatization” that passes for a free market in the U.S. These corporate capitalist military companies resemble states in their internal hierarchical organization and partner with governments to help wage wars paid for with coerced taxpayer money. As a largely Western phenmomen, they tend to be...

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was ended a few years ago. Its repeal was celebrated by many mainstream liberals, but the radical leftist, Against Equality Collective, had a more critical take. There is merit on both sides of the argumentative aisle. As long as government militaries exist; the freedom of gay individuals who serve to reveal their sexual identity is important. They can otherwise be trapped in a hellish nightmare of inauthenticity. It’s also true that progress doesn’t consist of more people killing for government and wars of empire. The correct position is therefore to see the ending of the policy...

As Charles Johnson has noted, July 4th is the anniversary of the death of an existing tyrannical government. Anarchists can therefore ironically appropriate the holiday for their own purposes. Let us celebrate the death of British colonial rule rather than the creation of a new nation-state. Both British imperialism and American nationalism deserve to be criticized. They both exalt and create division among the people of the world. Both lead to sanctifying a collectivist identity based on blood and soil. This encourages the use of aggressive violence to sustain an irrational collective unit. No one should raise the stars and...